Britain’s housing crisis: are garden cities the answer?

They’re billed as an idyllic alternative to generic commuter towns. But the first of a new generation of garden cities, in Ebbsfleet, Kent, has run into controversy. Will the end result be bog-standard suburban housing blighting the green belt?

An aerial view of Ebbsfleet showing the quarry and valley developments with Swanscombe to the rear – and London in the distance at top left. Photograph: Commission Air Ltd

Beyond the shops – a Co-op, a cafe, a tattoo studio called Demon Inkorporation – are narrow terraced streets where doors open on to the pavement. A newer red-brick estate has been erected on an old slurry pit, and in the distance are wind turbines, pylons, the roar of the A2 and the surreal sight of container ships the size of tower blocks slipping down the Thames.

Welcome to Britain’s newest garden city. Ebbsfleet, the name of the high-speed Eurostar railway station squeezed on to waste ground between Dartford and Gravesend, is the first of the government’s new generation of garden cities: low-density communities with generous green spaces and good local facilities. Garden cities are an idea whose time has come (again), enjoying the support of George Osborne, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg. They are seen as a way to persuade not-in-my-backyarders to tolerate urgently needed new housing estates. Are garden cities the solution to Britain’s housing crisis? Or are they a sham – the same-old suburbs smothering precious green belt?

This debate was ignited by David Rudlin, an urban designer who last month won the £250,000 Wolfson Economics prize for arguing we must “take a confident bite out of the green belt” and build new garden city extensions to around 40 existing provincial cities and towns, including Oxford, Taunton, Ipswich and Carlisle.

Politicians, architects and planners all say that the housing crisis – which means all but the seriously rich are priced out of booming cities and all but the super-rich are priced out of London – is only going to get worse: demographic trends suggest that 6m new homes are required over the next 30 years. That means 200,000 each year, and in England we have struggled to build half that – just 112,630 new homes – in the 12 months to March 2014.

Garden cities were the vision of a shorthand typist called Ebenezer Howard who worked in parliament and, in 1898, outlined his utopian alternative to industrial slums, combining the best of town and country. Howard’s vision of self-sufficient local communities of affordable homes built at a low density with green spaces and jobs nearby was realised through first Letchworth and then Welwyn Garden City. Letchworth offered affordable renting and home ownership (a three-bedroom house cost £175 in 1906), leisure facilities such as a nine-hole golf course and innovations including Britain’s first roundabout. Lenin is rumoured to have stayed the night in the town in 1907 and the garden city ideals were exported abroad, to Soviet cities including Stalingrad, and other new cities such as Canberra, Australia.

The desolate picture glimpsed from a high-speed train rushing through Ebbsfleet might confirm sceptics’ suspicions that garden cities are a hollow rebranding exercise. “To call this a garden city is satire,” wrote Simon Jenkins earlier this year. But a closer look at the new – and old – communities in this part of Kent reveals a more complicated picture.

Ebbsfleet is promising on paper. There is probably no better place to build a sizeable new town in south-east England. It has an underused high-speed railway station. A canyon-sized disused quarry already has outline planning permission for 10,000 new homes; more have been approved on adjacent brownfield sites. On marshy industrial land by the Thames, Paramount wants to build a £2bn attraction, bigger than the Olympic Park, which will create 27,000 local jobs. To the west is Bluewater shopping centre. Its malls can be linked up by a “Fastrack” bus system already partly in place. Osborne has promised £200m to help and, more significantly, an urban development corporation to speed up planning consent and cooperation between the two borough councils – Labour-controlled Gravesham and Conservative Dartford. Crucially, both councils also support the garden city.

In the cavernous Eastern Quarry, the first residents will move into their homes this month. Ebbsfleet may not currently look particularly scenic but it doesn’t take much imagination to see that this quarry community could be rather lovely. The developer, Land Securities, has spent more than £100m buying and landscaping the site, creating a south-facing slope down to natural lakes. Wooded quarry walls hide the A2 and most of the old industry. Land Securities has already adopted garden city-style principles: 6,000 homes will be arranged in three “villages” with central squares featuring local shops and schools. There will be safe footpaths for children and a green boulevard along which buses will whisk residents to the station, Bluewater or the Paramount development.

Jeremy Kite, leader of Dartford borough council, is confident that Ebbsfleet won’t become another commuter dormitory. “There’s nothing better than a village, whether it’s an urban village or something in the Cotswolds,” he says. “We’ve got local shops – they happen to be Bluewater – we’ve got a local railway station that happens to be 17 minutes from central London and we’ve got a playground which we happen to call Paramount theme park. If we get this right, it should be a really good model community. The notion that a resident would say, ‘My dream is to commute back and forth to Canary Wharf’ is nonsense. It shouldn’t be a dorm, it should be an importer rather than an exporter of people during the day.”

There is one problem with Ebbsfleet garden city: there is already a town here. It is called Swanscombe. The 14,000 residents of Swanscombe and Greenhithe are not the usual Nimbys – I cannot find anyone who is opposed to the new garden city – but many feel like they are being erased from the map.

“The development is not the problem – the problem is everyone is telling us what we need instead of asking us what we want,” says Bryan Read, leader of Swanscombe and Greenhithe town council. “Swanscombe has a lot of history,” he explains as he takes me on a grand tour of the immaculate town hall, community centre and national nature reserve. This became the first geological reserve in the country after a south-London dentist called Alvin Marston found a skull here in 1935. “Swanscombe Man” (now thought to be a woman) was 400,000 years old and lived alongside tigers, cave lions and elephants. Now, her descendants are furious about their disappearing heritage.

A sign shows the names of potential development areas in Ebbsfleet. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

“The people of Swanscombe are up in arms about the name ‘Ebbsfleet’, which is a name made up by Eurostar,” says Jeff Harvey, another town councillor. “They are not opposed to the development but to the erasing of our identity. Swanscombe is so steeped in history I don’t know why they want to disregard us. Over the years, people have suffered from the ‘regeneration’ building work and they haven’t had anything back. We’re just not even thought about.”

Developers are alert to community feeling – concerns over the Ebbsfleet name are “a proxy for wider concerns about being left behind”, acknowledges a spokesperson for Land Securities – but it is no wonder local residents feel excluded: the map of the proposed area covered by Ebbsfleet’s urban development corporation includes land all around Swanscombe but misses out the entire existing community. Locals fear the garden city will flourish, leaving Swanscombe its impoverished middle. “It looks like there’ll be a fence around us, or probably a wall,” laughs Harvey, half-joking. “It’s a nice estate, the quarry, but it’s going to spruce up the area and leave Swanscombe looking like a ghetto – it’s a them-and-us type situation.”

Read is desperate to see the necessary road, rail and bus improvements to link old and new communities and stop garden city gridlock. And it is on these infrastructural questions (rather than aesthetics – there is no reason why a garden city can’t be built on brownfield land) that Ebbsfleet falls short of the garden city ideal. It may receive some government subsidies but Ebbsfleet is being built in a largely standard way – with developers compelled to fund modest infrastructural improvements. Rudlin’s prize-winning vision of a new generation of garden cities is much more radical, and based on reviving the garden-city economic model last used for postwar new towns in Britain.

Is Ebbsfleet a garden city? “I wouldn’t say so,” says Rudlin. “It’s a housing estate styled as a garden city. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but the aspirations of a garden city can be higher than that.”

At the core of the housing crisis, says Rudlin, are crazy prices – of homes and land. The big winners are landowners. The value of land can rise 200-fold once it has planning permission; this bonanza means that landowners pay huge fees to planning professionals to get planning permission; together, they pocket the huge uplift in the value of the land. Developers are forced to pay so much for land that they can only afford to build cheap standardised homes. “This awful suburbia around our cities is the result of this dysfunctionality of our planning system,” thinks Rudlin.

His big idea is to revive the legislation that created new towns, with a revived “garden cities act” enabling the government to buy land at its “real” pre-planning permission price, as occurs in Germany and the Netherlands. When this land is sold for construction, the money made is used by each new “garden city foundation” to fund proper infrastructure. This more centrally planned model enables plots with infrastructure to be offered to people to build their own homes (or commission a local builder to do so). The popularity of Grand Designs suggests we would love this. And “the number of self-builds in Italy, Austria and France is huge”, says Rudlin. A “plot passport” would prevent the construction of ugly monstrosities, and self-builders, alongside the familiar high-volume house-builders would help hit the annual 200,000 new homes target.

Unfortunately, the politicians who have been quick to apparently embrace garden cities don’t seem to be seriously considering reviving their economic and legislative underpinning. Is there a danger Osborne and Clegg’s adoption of garden cities is just a way to rebadge the same old bog-standard suburban house-building? “Of course there is,” admits Rudlin. “That’s what happened with the original garden cities. Many of them are a pale shadow of what Ebenezer Howard suggested they would be. That’s the downside of an idea that gets traction – people will always take it and water it down and use it as branding rather than content.”

Houses in Welwyn Garden City, the epitome of Ebenezer Howard’s idea of new housing. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

For critics of garden cities, however, they are not the solution but part of the problem. Lord Rogers and the Campaign to Protect of Rural England have both argued we must build on brownfield land before biting into the green belt as Rudlin suggests. Rogers says at least 1.3m fairly low-density dwellings could be built on suitable brownfield land; there are also 400,000 homes with planning permission not yet built. The influential architect fears Rudlin’s garden cities would become car-dependent suburbs that risk emptying existing cities. In response, Rudlin argues that brownfield is not always available where houses are needed. “You can’t just build a load of houses in a northern mill town,” says Rudlin. “If you’re going to accept you don’t grow Oxford – where there are few brownfields and huge pressure for growth – but you do grow Burnley then you’ve got to have a national policy [to tackle geographical economic imbalances].” From an ecological perspective, brownfield is sometimes far more precious than arable green belt, as demonstrated by the controversy over 5,000 homes planned for an old Ministry of Defence site at Lodge Hill, not far from Ebbsfleet. This overgrown barracks is now the best site in the country for endangered nightingales.

Other planning experts fear that garden cities will only worsen the housing crisis. Each morning, Adrian Jones, a town planner and author of Towns in Britain, watches trains from Welwyn Garden City, packed with commuters, pass his London home. “Garden cities were to be self-sufficient communities, not dormitory suburbs,” he says. “There’s a huge nexus of planning and transport issues around the concentration of jobs, power and investment in London. A few more garden cities doesn’t solve the problem, it exacerbates it.” According to Jones, the housing crisis was caused by selling off public housing; it can be solved by building it again. Far better to rent from a public agency than a private one, argues Jones, not least because the public body can borrow money more cheaply than a private landlord.

Given the drastic forecast that we need 6m new homes over the next three decades, is a more radical rethink required? Frances Holliss, an architect and academic at London Metropolitan University, identifies garden cities as part of the source of the housing crisis. Victorian social reformers were horrified by urban slums where home-workers were appallingly exploited. Alongside the provision of new social housing, Howard’s garden cities helped establish a principle still embedded in planning regulations today: the separation of work and home. Many social housing tenancy agreements, for example, still prohibit running a business from home. This has created what Holliss sees as “an enormous amount of wastage in our building stock”: homes are empty in the day; huge offices are desolate at night (to say nothing of the money and energy wasted on commuting between them). If more people were allowed to work from home, and offices and industrial spaces were not prohibited as places to live, argues Holliss, we wouldn’t need to construct so many new buildings on green or brown fields. “We need to be more flexible about how we inhabit buildings. Home-based work has a role in terms of making building stock more efficient. We have the potential to inhabit a very wide range of buildings as combined dwellings and workplaces if we can only loosen up the rules. I really don’t believe we need to build more; we need to inhabit what we’ve got in a far more imaginative way.”